Tapping is an excellent tool when you know what your problem is. Sometimes, however, we’re not quite sure what’s bothering us — we might have a general feeling of dissatisfaction, or feel disrupted, vaguely off-kilter, but not know why. Tapping in these situations is still the solution! (I sometimes find, with tapping, that the problem is a bad dream from the night before that I hadn’t consciously registered.)
The way to identify what is troubling you is straightforward: simply tap around the points* asking “what is it that’s bothering me? What’s going on here? Why do I feel …?” Let the tapping be slow and gentle, almost meditative, to allow thoughts to swim up from your subconscious. It can be helpful to pause, rest a hand on your heart, close your eyes and just think the question. It can be quite a poetic process: like dropping a pebble in a pond and watching the ripples unfold.
Tapping can also fine-tune or readjust your understanding of a problem you believe you have. Just the other day I had an interesting experience with a client — a young woman who had come to me to help her with her fear of flying. As soon as we started tapping, I suddenly had the clear but unexpected thought that fear of flying was actually not the problem. I rapidly suppressed this thought: it felt awkward, minutes into the session, to tell her the problem she had come to me with was actually not the problem! I made peace with my intuition (which objects to being ignored and tends to get louder when disregarded) by tiptoeing around the subject, asking questions. We soon established that flying in a plane —as long as there was zero turbulence — was actually enjoyable for her, indeed a piece of cake. She recalled flying over Venice and loving the view, feeling happy and relaxed. But as we spoke of wind and bad weather in any context — flying, being on a boat, skiing, driving — her face scrunched up and she became visibly agitated. Her “fear of flying” was actually… a fear of storms. We proceeded to have a profitable session tapping on her dislike of “bad” weather, gradually reframing it. We were sitting on my balcony, and thoughts of flowers needing help to pollinate, and birds appreciating a wind at their back gradually started to shift her “rules” about what Nature is and isn’t allowed to do. At the end of the session, thinking about the flight she will take in May, she said she was now looking forward to it!
PS I hope you may be amused by the entirely irrelevant artwork I found while googling “Tapping Questions.” It made me smile! (And inspired me to add a picture of myself and my dog BearBear: we too are “Dogged in our Pursuits of Tapping Excellence”!)
*eyebrown, side of eye, under eye, under nose, chin, just below the collarbone, under arm, top of head: see diagrams on my website. www.jenniferdavidson.com